What I Learned About GenAI From Over 100 Indian CMOs
What an amazing two weeks it was!
After countless flights and hotel check-ins, I’m pleased to share what I observed from Forrester’s roundtable events covering generative AI (genAI) in marketing, held in four cities: Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore.
From meeting with more than 100 CMOs and key marketing leaders at midsized and large enterprises, a clear picture emerged about the massive transformation that genAI is already bringing to many marketing organizations across the Indian subcontinent.
Here is a sample of what I heard, grouped by a summary of what it means for B2B marketers in the region.
Early Adopters Are Already In Production
“I am seeing huge productivity gains. Earlier, it used to take us a couple of days to get 2–3 variations of images we wanted for our campaigns, and now it takes hours, including reviews!”
“I was not surprised, Subhendu! The data points you presented about genAI adoption are so true; we are already seeing that genAI is helping us customize our collaterals for specific buying situations.”
“We are training our in-house LLMs [large language models] to help read the RFPs that we have submitted over the years and help us with the responses to the RFPs that we are responding to now.”
“Blogs and ad copy are the most common ones, but what we see helping us the most is when we used genAI for keyword analysis to drive traffic and content optimization to drive conversion from our [website landing] pages.”
Concerned
“My design team leader walked up to me and said, ‘Now that genAI is able to do things faster and more creatively, how do you envision my team’s role going forward?’”
“There are issues with genAI tools. The output is generic, and the output is faulty, too. I am spending more time reviewing AI’s work than it would have taken me to write a new piece!”
“I am concerned that if future AI regulations require us to take down creatives that are AI-generated, it will be a massive exercise. I’m not sure if we should scale up now or then.”
“What about creativity? And differentiation?”
“I don’t think humans will be replaced anytime soon. There will be issues with scaling up [genAI initiatives], and what we need to figure out is if we are ready to adopt genAI at scale, as an enterprisewide initiative.”
Scaling Up
“I thought I would get to know the genAI tools that we can use; there are so many of them now. I feel that we need to keep looking.”
“We can meet the asks of our sales team so well now. They query the genAI interface and get the collateral and responses for specific follow-up situations. We just need to figure out the gaps and fill them quickly. And correctly!”
“There are a series of training sessions that we have rolled out for our employees, across the organization, to help them understand the new technology and its capabilities, and we are already seeing great improvement!”
Mixed Voices In The Room: Opinions Are Divided
As you can tell from the above quotes, it is evident that every marketing leader is actively evaluating genAI, but the opinions on its utility are divided. If I were to categorize the emotions, I would say there’s equal parts excitement and concern among this group of more than 100 Indian CMOs.
There definitely are early-mover organizations with leaders pushing forward despite the teething troubles with the new technology, while others are taking a cautious approach. However, everyone (almost!) acknowledged that it is time to take action. Marketing leaders are driving their teams to creatively query LLMs, engineer prompts to drive the fastest value, and train teams on the benefits, risks, policies, and methods. What stands out most as a concern is the question, “Are we going about it in the right way?”
The Way Forward
Marketing budgets, resources, and the time to experiment are limited. Some organizations believe in a fail-fast culture, while some are more risk-averse, waiting until the dust settles. Whatever your approach, Forrester’s genAI use case prioritization model helps you apply a consistent method to evaluate every genAI use case with a dual lens: impact and risk.
If you would like to discuss how you can define and scale your genAI strategy, just reach out by contacting us.